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Carol Truemner, Communications Officer (email | x33470)
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Waterloo Engineering researchers behind an open-source project to detect COVID-19 using chest X-rays and artificial intelligence (AI) announced a significant advancement this week.
In addition to detecting the disease, researchers said their technology is now capable of determining its severity.
Researchers are using AI and chest X-rays to determine COVID-19 severity.
The project, dubbed COVID-Net, was launched in March by researchers at the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab and DarwinAI, a Waterloo startup company co-founded by Alexander Wong, a professor of systems design engineering.
Sheldon Fernandez, a Waterloo Engineering alumnus and CEO of DarwinAI, said in a blog post that the advancement was made using over 10,000 chest X-rays - including hundreds from patients with COVID-19 - in collaboration with doctors at Stony Brook Medicine in New York.
New open-source AI models called COVIDNet-S help doctors triage and prioritize patients for treatment based on the severity of their conditions.
“We have high hopes that COVIDNet-S will be a useful tool in supporting front-line workers throughout the world,” Fernandez wrote in his post.
Carol Truemner, Communications Officer (email | x33470)
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The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office.